Sunday, October 23, 2011

I
can remember about 13 years ago, sharing with my then current boss in
the technology department, something that I had created using, probably
Supercard at that time, that duplicated many of the same software
instructional strategies found in an application the elementary schools
were paying thousands of dollars to implement. I can remember my boss
being impressed but then saying, why would teachers want to learn to
create their own software when they could buy it from some a textbook
publisher. The fact that I had created, what I’ll call a proof of
concept, in little more than a week and incorporated aspects that I
thought were more relative to the students in our schools was lost in
the belief that most teachers didn’t have the skill, computer knowledge,
or creativity to design and develop their own software. I may just
caught her a little off guard with my impromptu presentation of what was
capable. In either case, her comment bothered me, and 13 years later
I’m hearing the same arguments when it comes to online learning. There
are many reason why I think just purchasing tools from a large publisher
is a bad idea and that as educational professionals, it just strikes me
as ridiculous that we would even be thinking about purchasing online
learning curriculum from some outside-our-community publisher.First,
teachers have been developing curriculum for their students as long as I
can remember. Curriculum is not just a textbook the State has blessed
for use in the classroom. Curriculum is not a program that streams over
the Internet to some indiscriminate student in front of a LCD screen.
Curriculum is the collections of tools that addresses a specific
learning concept or goal that we have deemed important for identified
unique students. It is a collection of content, strategies, practices,
mistakes, and innovations on the part of the teacher and learner to
construct meaning in the head of the student, and many times in the head
of the teacher. You will find no better curriculum developers, that
are in touch with your community, know your students, and understand
what is most important for your students to learn, than the hard working
men and women in your local classrooms. These individuals have been
doing this work from day one. We should be taking advantage of these
resources to develop curriculum, maximizing the new technology tools,
and in the process providing avenues for looking at how school can be
done better for our children. So much of what is currently available for
sale by large publishers today in the online education arena is the
same old classroom content that we have been creating and using for
years just snatched up, repackaged in a shiny new box, and stamped with
the words “Online Learning Curriculum.” The worse we could do by
developing the online curriculum ourselves is to duplicate what is
currently available through the big publishers. Even then, our
curriculum would be more targeted to our students and community as
opposed to being created to address the widest audience possible. One
other point is the fact that when commercial publishers talk about their
online learning curriculum, try to pin point what percentage of the
instruction is using technology and is online? How much of what they
provide is actually different from a traditional face to face classroom
and capitalizes and strengths of technology
(communication/collaboration/creativity/development/voice/perspective/action)
and how much of it is the same thing just viewed through a few thousand
pixels.

It
should not be surprising that creating curriculum for an online
learning environment is not something a school district would do without
cost. However, any school district that is seriously thinking about
shelling out 75% or more of their ADA to commercial content provider
should not be dissuaded from moving in this direction. For schools and
districts that go down this road, there will be a learning curve and an
initial investment of resources. It would be expected. However,
successfully implementing a curriculum development process would provide
the institution with advantages leaps beyond those that implement
online learning programs with generic curriculum. The best online
schools will be those with the best curriculum, and those that are the
most successful will have created their own curriculum.